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Psychoanalytic Theories of Development fulfills the needs of analytic clinicians and theorists for a careful and accurate assessment of the burgeoning observations of infants and children and their integration into the body of psychoanalytic knowledge.
Phyllis and Robert Tyson have accomplished the impossible. They have produced a volume that is monumental in nature, but manageable in length. They have summarized and criticized Freud's statements about, and theories of, development. They have described many details of infant-observational research that cast light on psychoanalytic conceptions of development. They have described in less detail other analysts' theories of development based on infant observation, and criticized these as well. They have integrated early observations with those of patients in analysis to give a broader picture than that usually drawn of the progression from infancy to adulthood. Although they pay attention to continuity in development, they emphasize discontinuity and transformations that occur as the child matures. Their picture of the adult is not just that of a large infant still undergoing infantile patterns repetitively. They describe the changing, growing individual who integrates earlier patterns into later ones. They recognize the importance of psychic conflict as it appears in the preoedipal, oedipal, and postoedipal child. Since their extensive experience includes observations in analysis of children and adults, they know the complexity of more mature persons and therefore do not reach simple conclusions about oversimplified individuals.
The authors whose work the book encompasses are varied and at times divergent. They include Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, W. R. D. Fairbairn, D. W. Winnicott, O. F. Kernberg, H. Kohut, R. A. Spitz, M. S. Mahler, D. N. Stern, R. N. Emde and J. Piaget, among others. The Tysons do not create "an integrated amalgam of all [psychoanalytic] perspectives," as Wallerstein at one point suggest